The General Congregation of the Order of Carmelites, meeting in Rome since Sept. 5, traveled to the Basilica of St. Bartholomew on the Island (San Bartolomeo all’Isola) on Friday, September 16, the final day of the meeting, to deliver an autographed letter from St. Titus Brandsma. The relic from the new saint was placed in the Sanctuary of New Martyrs in the church.
The Sanctuary of New Martyrs (Santuario dei Nuovi Martiri), was established following the Jubilee Year of 2000. The year before the jubilee, St. John Paul II established a "Commission of the New Martyrs" to investigate Christian martyrdom in the 20th century. The commission worked for two years on the premises of St. Bartholomew's Basilica, collecting some 12,000 files.
Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio, says, "I entered the great archive of the New Martyrs Commission, where letters, reports, memoirs are collected that, in recent years, have arrived in Rome from all over the world. I began to leaf through them. They were official letters from bishops' conferences around the world. But also memoirs from simple groups of religious. I read and got hooked. There were thousands of stories of contemporary men and women: Christians who had been killed as such."
The pope wanted the basilica to become the Memorial Site of the New Martyrs. The proclamation was solemnly celebrated on Oct. 12, 2002. The Orthodox Patriarch of Romania, Teoctist, witnessed the placement large icon dedicated to the Witnesses of the Faith of the 20th century was placed on the high altar.
On April 7, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI honored the memory of the Witnesses of the Faith of the 20th and 21st centuries with a visit to the Community of Sant'Egidio on its 40th anniversary. The six altars, the pope explained, "Remember the Christians who fell under the totalitarian violence of Communism, Nazism, those killed in America, in Asia and Oceania, in Spain and Mexico, in Africa. We ideally retrace many painful events of the past century. So many fell while fulfilling the Church's evangelizing mission: their blood mingled with that of native Christians to whom the faith had been communicated."
In his role as spiritual director of the National Union of Catholic Journalists, Brandsma encouraged publishers to oppose the publication of Nazi propaganda in Catholic newspapers. The refusal of Catholic newspapers to print Nazi propaganda sealed Titus's fate.
He had agreed to personally deliver to each publisher a letter from the Catholic bishops. This letter instructed the publishers not to comply with a new law requiring them to publish official Nazi announcements and articles. Titus met with fourteen publishers before being arrested by the Gestapo in Nijmegen on January 19, 1942.
Interned in Scheveningen and Amersfoort, Holland, he was deported to Dachau in June of that year.
Under that harsh regime, his health deteriorated rapidly and he was transferred to the camp hospital as early as the third week of July. He was subjected to chemical experiments before being killed by lethal injection on July 26, 1942. On the day of his death, the Dutch bishops published a pastoral letter strongly protesting the deportation of Jews from Holland.
Before his execution, Titus had prayed that God would help the nurse who would give the injection to repent of her actions in the camp. He also gave her his rosary beads, although she protested, saying she was a non-practicing Catholic. A few years later, the same woman went to a Carmelite priory to ask for forgiveness and was a witness in the beatification trial, which took place in Rome, Nov. 3, 1985.
Brandsma was canonized by Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square on May 15, 2022.
St. Titus’ letter is on loan to the church.
